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Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics

Elizabeth A. Fay

4/5 ( ratings)

This innovative book explores the hypothesis that "Wordsworth the Poet" is an imaginative projection in which both William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy collaborated, developing a persona that the siblings strove to inhabit. Because William was its principal enactor, both publicly and privately, poetically and experimentally, his tendency was to sublimate Dorothy into an audible but invisible muse, located just behind him. Dorothy, however, always imagined herself in a collaborative or twinned relation to William, even when he was absent. She experienced the Wordsworthian role as increasingly alienating, more an aesthetic performance to be enacted at will, whereas William found the role ever more natural and inseparable from himself.

This book explores the ways in which the Wordsworths were particularly suited to develop their collaborative persona, the literary fictions they drew on, and the value they derived from such a concerted and utopian effort. The author bases her work on well-known Wordsworthian texts, as well as little-read lyrics and essays of William and the comparatively unknown oeuvre of Dorothy.

Language: English

Pages: 288

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

Release: July 20, 1995

ISBN: 0870239600

ISBN 13: 9780870239601

Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics

Elizabeth A. Fay

4/5 ( ratings)

This innovative book explores the hypothesis that "Wordsworth the Poet" is an imaginative projection in which both William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy collaborated, developing a persona that the siblings strove to inhabit. Because William was its principal enactor, both publicly and privately, poetically and experimentally, his tendency was to sublimate Dorothy into an audible but invisible muse, located just behind him. Dorothy, however, always imagined herself in a collaborative or twinned relation to William, even when he was absent. She experienced the Wordsworthian role as increasingly alienating, more an aesthetic performance to be enacted at will, whereas William found the role ever more natural and inseparable from himself.

This book explores the ways in which the Wordsworths were particularly suited to develop their collaborative persona, the literary fictions they drew on, and the value they derived from such a concerted and utopian effort. The author bases her work on well-known Wordsworthian texts, as well as little-read lyrics and essays of William and the comparatively unknown oeuvre of Dorothy.

Language: English

Pages: 288

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

Release: July 20, 1995

ISBN: 0870239600

ISBN 13: 9780870239601

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